Trump's
Claim That A General Dipped Bullets In Pigs'
Blood is Fake News
Pershing had left the islands and the
Philippine-US war was officially over when the
Americans slaughtered the Moro Muslims in their
hundreds – men, women and children. With
Trump-like enthusiasm, Republican President
Theodore Roosevelt congratulated the US
commanders on their 'brilliant feat of arms'
By Robert Fisk
August 22,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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I don’t know what
the people of Barcelona think about Trump’s
demented and repulsive
tale of bullets and pig’s blood
– but I know what Mark Twain would have said. He
was the finest American political writer of his
time – perhaps of all time – and he wrote with
bitterness, sarcasm and disgust about the US
military’s war crimes in the Philippines in
1906. No doubt Trump would have approved of
them.
As so
often, there’s no proof – and thus no truth – to
the story that General Pershing ever told his
soldiers to execute Filipino fighters with
bullets dipped in pigs’ blood. Besides, Pershing
had left the islands and the Philippine-US war
was officially over when the Americans
slaughtered the Moro Muslims in their hundreds –
men, women and children – in what became known
as the Battle of Bud Dajo. With Trump-like
enthusiasm, Republican President Theodore
Roosevelt congratulated the US commanders on
their “brilliant feat of arms”.
Twain –
Samuel Clemens, to use his real name – thought
differently. The American military had brutally
crushed an uprising by the ethnic Muslim Moro
people, a final and hopeless battle in the
Philippine war of independence against the
United States. It is a tale not without
significance in any study of America’s recent
occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq.
He
wrote a deeply cynical essay about the “battle”
of Bud Dajo a few days later. Up to 1,000 Moro
men, women and children were killed by US forces
who had surrounded them in their mountain refuge
2,200 feet above sea level, a volcanic crater in
which all but six of the Muslims were killed. A
surviving photograph of the atrocity shows
uniformed US troops standing above piles of
corpses, one of them a bare-breasted woman.
“With
600 engaged on each side,” Twain wrote, “we lost
15 men killed outright, and we had 32 wounded …
The enemy numbered 600 – including women and
children – and we abolished them utterly,
leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its
dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest
victory that was ever achieved by the Christian
soldiers of the United States … The splendid
news appeared with splendid display – heads in
every newspaper in this city … But there was not
a single reference to it in the editorial
columns of any one of those newspapers.”
Twain
observed that not one reader wrote to support
the US “victory”. But President Theodore
Roosevelt sent his congratulations to the US
Commander, Major General Leonard Wood, in
Manila: “I congratulate you and the officers and
men of your command upon the brilliant feat of
arms wherein you and they so well upheld the
honour of the American flag.”
Twain
recorded the headlines over the following days –
“Women Slain in Moro Massacre”, “With Children
They Mixed in Mob in Crater, and All Died
Together”, “Death List is Now 900”, “Impossible
to Tell Sexes Apart in Fierce Battle on Top of
Mount Dajo” – and remarked that “the naked
savages were so far away, down in the bottom of
that trap, that our soldiers could not tell the
breasts of a woman from the rudimentary paps of
a man – so far away that they couldn’t tell a
toddling child from a black six-footer.” A
headline announcing “Lieutenant Johnson Blown
from Parapet by Exploding Artillery Gallantly
Leading Charge” convinced Twain that the soldier
must have been wounded by his own side – since
the Moros had no artillery.
But he
shrewdly noted that Johnson had been a member of
the volunteer “Rough Riders” unit raised to
fight in the Spanish-American war – the conflict
which gave the US possession of the Philippines
– and commanded by the same Major General Wood
who oversaw the massacre in 1906. Wood’s
second-in-command was the same Theodore
Roosevelt who was now President. No wonder
Roosevelt cabled his wounded men: “How are you?”
Johnson replied: “Fine, thanks.” This, Twain
cynically observed, “is historical. This will go
down to posterity.”
Twain
described a subsequent luncheon party at which
his wealthy publisher George Harvey, a Democrat
who supported Woodrow Wilson, “said he believed
that the shock and shame of this episode would
eat down deeper and deeper into the hearts of
the nation and fester there and produce results
… I cannot believe that the prediction will come
true, for the reason that prophecies which
promise valuable things, desirable things, good
things, worthy things, never come true.
Prophecies of this kind are like wars fought in
a good cause – they are so rare that they don’t
count.”
The
Moro massacre was initially, as Twain predicted,
a public relations disaster. It could not be
regarded as “a brilliant feat of arms”, even “if
Christian America, represented by its salaried
soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles …
instead of bullets.”
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Grants
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Later
accounts of the mass killings – readers must
keep a straight face when they remember more
recent quotations of this kind – claimed that
the Moro women had been used as human shields by
the men in the crowd and were thus what we would
today call “collateral damage”. US troops wrote
home about other atrocities in the Philippines,
including the torching of villages and the
killing of their occupants. A form of water
torture was also used to extract information
during the eight-year anti-independence
campaign.
The
Philippines was the first imperial war fought by
the United States – it never claimed possession
of Korea or Vietnam, even of Japan after the
Second World War – and the pattern of “shock and
awe” inflicted on the Moro people was to be
repeated, as we know, in the Middle East.
The
Moro Muslims were a minority among the country’s
then more than 80 per cent Christian Catholic
population. But well over a century after
general Wood’s killings in the volcano, his
military descendants have “assisted” the
Philippine government in its battle against
Muslim insurgents from – and readers may have
guessed the identity – the Moro Liberation
Front.
The
Philippines’ current president Rodrigo Duterte,
who has several times used the 1906 slaughter of
the Moros to condemn America, is now using his
police death squads to kill thousands in his
“war on drugs”. Trump has said that Duterte is
doing an “unbelievable job”. Kind of important,
I guess, to remember the facts of history – even
if Trump gets them all wrong.
This
article was first published by
The Independent
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